Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [58]
“Why his, of course,” said Ainsley.
Marian had a disturbing vision of a trophy room with stuffed and antlered heads nailed to the walls. “Why not just use his scalp?” she asked. Leonard, after all, was supposed to be her friend.
She pondered the situation while she ate her T. V. dinner and drank her tea in solitude, Ainsley having departed, and while she dawdled around the apartment waiting for it to be the right time for the late show. All the way to the nearest movie-theatre district she was still pondering it. She had felt for some time, in one of the smaller and more obscure crevices of her mind, that she ought to do something to warn Len, but she didn’t know what, or, more importantly, why. She knew he would not readily believe that Ainsley, who seemed as young and inexperienced as a button mushroom, was in reality a scheming superfemale carrying out a foul plot against him, using him in effect as an inexpensive substitute for artificial insemination with a devastating lack of concern for his individuality. And there was no convincing evidence as yet; Ainsley had been most discreet. Marian had thought several times of calling him up in the middle of the night with a nylon stocking over the telephone mouthpiece and whispering “Beware!”; but that would do no good. He would never guess what he was supposed to beware of. Anony mous letters … he’d think it was some crank; or a jealous former girlfriend trying to foil his own fiendish plans, which would only make his pursuit more eager. Besides, ever since she had become engaged there had been a tacit agreement with Ainsley: neither was to interfere with the other’s strategy, though it was apparent that each disapproved of the other’s course of action on moral grounds. If she said anything to Len she knew that Ainsley would be perfectly capable of carrying out a successful, or at any rate an unsettling, counter-attack. No, Len must be abandoned to his fate, which he would no doubt embrace with glee. Marian was further confused by the fact that she didn’t exactly know whether an early Christian was being thrown to the lions, or an early lion to the Christians. Was she, as Ainsley had asked her during one of their Sunday discussions, on the side of the Creative Life Force, or wasn’t she?
There was also the lady down below to be considered. Even if she wasn’t peering out a window or standing in ambush behind one of the velvet curtains when Leonard arrived, she would almost certainly be aware that a pair of masculine feet had ascended the stairs; and in her mind, that despotic empire where the proprieties had the rigidity and force of the law of gravity, what went up must come down, preferably before eleven-thirty at night. Though she had never said so: it was merely something one took into account. Marian hoped Ainsley would have the sense either to get him over with and get him out before twelve at the latest, or, if the worse came to the worst, to keep him there, and keep him quiet, all night; what they would do with him the next morning, in that case, she was not sure. He would probably have to be smuggled out in the laundry bag. Even if he was in any condition to walk by himself. Oh, well; they could always find another apartment. But she hated scenes.
Marian got off the subway at the station near the laundromat. There were two movie theatres close by, across the street from each other. She inspected them. One was offering a foreign film with subtitles, advertised outside by black-and-white fuzzy reproductions of ecstatic newspaper reviews and much use of the words “adult” and “mature.” It had won several awards. The other had a low-budget American Western and technicolour posters of horsemen and dying Indians. In her present state she did not feel like writhing through intensities and pauses and long artistic closeups of expressively twitched skin pores. She was looking only for warmth, shelter, and something resembling oblivion, so she chose the Western. When she groped her way to a seat